This is why establishing specific KPIs, or key performance indicators, is one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself, your team, and your bottom line.

But which metrics should you be tracking? And more importantly, which metrics should inform your marketing decisions?

This is the question I faced early on in my Internet marketing career.

What metrics do I focus on?

Eventually, I came around to the right perspective on things.

Here’s how it happened.

First, I realized that revenue was my single most important metric.

Then, I worked backwards to find out what numbers most impacted my revenue.

I used those numbers—my KPIs—to track my progress toward revenue.

With so much variability in marketing techniques, it’s easy to get bogged down in minutia and focus on metrics that do not significantly affect your revenue.

To help you on your quest for maximum revenue, I’ve compiled a list of some of the most important KPIs you can track for maximum performance, maximum ROI, and maximum revenue.

Each of these metrics should be tracked on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis so that you can see the complete picture with regards to your marketing efforts.

Tracking them is only the first step.

Acting on these metrics is the real deal.

1. Traffic

If you want to be able to develop effective content and digital marketing campaigns, you have to track your web traffic so that you can understand what’s working and what’s not.

Unless you are tracking your web traffic, you will never be able to truly gauge the effectiveness of your different marketing methods and increase the amount of traffic your website receives.

For example, by tracking your web traffic, you may find that when you are consistently posting on Facebook and LinkedIn, your traffic soars, but whenever you focus on Instagram and Twitter, your traffic plummets.

Luckily, tracking your web traffic is fairly straightforward.

By using Google Analytics, you can track the number of sessions and page views you get each day as well as the details such as bounce rate, demographics, and source.

“Traffic” is, of course, a pretty broad term.

Traffic can encompass a lot of the more detailed features of your website audience, all of which are important to pay attention to.

Your website traffic tells a story—a story of how engaged and active your audience is, how frequently they visit you, and how likely they are to purchase from you.

The better you know your traffic, the better you’ll be able to achieve your revenue goals.

2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

This is one of the most important metrics any company, especially startups, should know.

Chase Hughes wrote about this metric on Kissmetrics. He called it “the one metric that can determine your company’s fate.”

I’d say that’s a pretty important metric.

So, what is the customer acquisition cost?

Here is a simple definition:

CAC: The price you pay to convince someone to purchase your product or service.

Don’t be deceived by the simplicity of that definition.

The CAC should include the cost of market research, software, team salaries, paid analytics platforms, and, of course, the price of any paid advertising.

If you want to be able to effectively grow your company through your marketing efforts, you have to know how much it costs to acquire a new customer.

In spite of its complexity, this is actually fairly easy to calculate.

All you need to do is add up the monthly marketing budget and then divide that number by the number of new customers you acquired that month.

For example, let’s say you spent $2,000 a month on marketing and acquired 5 new customers. This brings your total cost of customer acquisition to $400.

With this knowledge, you now know how to effectively budget for marketing, depending on the number of customers you wish to acquire.

Using the above example, if you wanted to acquire 20 new customers in a month, you would need to spend roughly $8,000 in marketing efforts.

While this number may vary month to month based on how effective your marketing campaigns are, averaging the cost of acquisition over three months will give you a good idea of what you need to spend on marketing to attract your desired number of new customers.

To better understand your CAC, it’s helpful to break down the specific channels you’re using to acquire customers.

For example, you may be using several marketing methods: paid search, social media, and email marketing.

3. Social media reach

With more than 2 billion people using social media around the world, there has never been—in the history of the human race—a platform that could allow you to have as much reach and influence as social media can today.

In addition to their massive reach, most social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, provide you with the tools to track your reach within the applications.

If you want to maximize the amount of revenue you generate each week, month, and year, you need to track the effectiveness of your social campaigns and understand the ROI of each platform.

How do you do this on Facebook?

Simple.

Go to your company Facebook page.

Click on “Insights” at the top of the page.

Facebook Insights provides you with data to help you fully understand what your audience is doing, how it’s interacting, and how it’s impacting your business.

When you know this data, you can develop a rock-solid social media strategy to maximize your reach and revenue.

4. Landing page conversion rates

If you truly want to maximize your revenue and send your conversion rates through the roof, you have to make sure that each of your landing pages is fully optimized.

You may find that one landing page has a high amount of traffic while another—with a lower rate of traffic—actually has a higher conversion rate.

For this reason, it’s crucial to track at least four major metrics on landing pages specifically:

Bounce rate

Exit rate

Click-through rate (CTR)

Conversion rate

Each of these numbers contributes to the overall picture of your conversion rates and keeps you from being locked into a skewed perspective.

One way to help broaden your perspective is to understand what an “average” conversion rate is. It’s hard to nail down an “average” because of the variety of industries, channels, and types of conversion that exist.

When you start, don’t expect to instantly explode with a 5% conversion rate. Most of us are lucky if we can get a 2% conversion rate.

It makes sense to use email marketing and then act on the data you glean from analyzing its performance.

Conclusion

If you can learn to effectively track the important metrics of your business, you’ll be able to see how your marketing efforts are affecting your revenue and have a better understanding of how you can improve and optimize your marketing efforts.

But like with anything in the business world, this is something you have to track proactively. You cannot just set it and forget it—track one or two metrics and then leave it for months at a time.

If you can be consistent with tracking your metrics, focusing on how every decision you make affects the bottom line, you can maximize your revenue and take your business to new heights.

Keep in mind that you are focused on one top metric: revenue.

When you lose sight of revenue, you’ll easily get distracted by meaningless metrics that don’t show you where you’re actually going. Worse, those metrics may fool you into thinking you’re making progress when you aren’t.

To be truly effective, your marketing metrics should show you a path forward—how to earn more revenue.

Metrics really are the magic key that can unlock marketing success. But they are a double-edged sword.

Read them wrong—and your marketing is doomed.

Read them right, act on them—and your marketing will push your business forward.